Too little, too late. You can't ban a 30% party and expect democracy to hold.
this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2024
632 points (98.6% liked)
World News
39358 readers
2770 users here now
A community for discussing events around the World
Rules:
-
Rule 1: posts have the following requirements:
- Post news articles only
- Video links are NOT articles and will be removed.
- Title must match the article headline
- Not United States Internal News
- Recent (Past 30 Days)
- Screenshots/links to other social media sites (Twitter/X/Facebook/Youtube/reddit, etc.) are explicitly forbidden, as are link shorteners.
-
Rule 2: Do not copy the entire article into your post. The key points in 1-2 paragraphs is allowed (even encouraged!), but large segments of articles posted in the body will result in the post being removed. If you have to stop and think "Is this fair use?", it probably isn't. Archive links, especially the ones created on link submission, are absolutely allowed but those that avoid paywalls are not.
-
Rule 3: Opinions articles, or Articles based on misinformation/propaganda may be removed. Sources that have a Low or Very Low factual reporting rating or MBFC Credibility Rating may be removed.
-
Rule 4: Posts or comments that are homophobic, transphobic, racist, sexist, anti-religious, or ableist will be removed. “Ironic” prejudice is just prejudiced.
-
Posts and comments must abide by the lemmy.world terms of service UPDATED AS OF 10/19
-
Rule 5: Keep it civil. It's OK to say the subject of an article is behaving like a (pejorative, pejorative). It's NOT OK to say another USER is (pejorative). Strong language is fine, just not directed at other members. Engage in good-faith and with respect! This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.
-
Rule 6: Memes, spam, other low effort posting, reposts, misinformation, advocating violence, off-topic, trolling, offensive, regarding the moderators or meta in content may be removed at any time.
-
Rule 7: We didn't USED to need a rule about how many posts one could make in a day, then someone posted NINETEEN articles in a single day. Not comments, FULL ARTICLES. If you're posting more than say, 10 or so, consider going outside and touching grass. We reserve the right to limit over-posting so a single user does not dominate the front page.
We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.
All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.
Lemmy World Partners
News [email protected]
Politics [email protected]
World Politics [email protected]
Recommendations
For Firefox users, there is media bias / propaganda / fact check plugin.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/media-bias-fact-check/
- Consider including the article’s mediabiasfactcheck.com/ link
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
A ban is incredibly hard. Not impossible, but hard. And even if, it won't solve the actual problem. The AfD maintained the image of a protest party and to this day people believe this crap. A great way to cut their votes in half would be educating the population so they understand that protest is good but voting for fascist scum is not.
load more comments
(1 replies)
Good.
Banning the party isn't going to help.
Like I say of Trump, the AfD isn't the problem, they're a symptom. Conservatism and conservatives themselves are the problem – the question is how should we deal with them, and I really don't know the answer to that.
Edit: just to clarify, I'm not saying the AfD shouldn't be banned, just that banning the party won't change the people who vote for it and run it.
Banning the party isn’t going to help.
Yes it will. It'll mean it won't be standing in elections, and that's only fair because it's an anti-democratic party... and it will deprive its members of broad protections afforded to parties and remove a unifying banner for them.
Banning anti-democratic institutions in a democracy is not only justified, it is conducive to the democracy's survival. It lifts the bar for getting rid of democracy to be equivalent to not winning in an election but by establishing a second monopoly on violence, a far greater threshold and attempts at which are more straightforward to deter, prosecute and stamp out than being within every TikTok user's first few swipes.
There's nothing that prevents AfD voters from going to other parties, there's plenty, or to voice their concerns in a new party that can be a legitimate part of the democratic system. Changing parties isn't like banning a religion or a creed or a race, a party is hardly more than just a banner, the power of which can change between and during elections, at any time, through a simple act of the mind. Banning the party will absolutely help.
It sends a good message. It doesn't send a message of wanting the silence the concerns of those who voted for the AfD in anything but the short term, it sends the message of 'we hear you, but try again... a bit less fascist-y please'.
Note that I'm not saying the AfD shouldn't be banned, just that banning it won't make the people who vote for it and run it any less, well, fascist.
There’s nothing that prevents AfD voters from going to other parties, there’s plenty, or to voice their concerns in a new party that can be a legitimate part of the democratic system. Changing parties isn’t like banning a religion or a creed or a race, a party is hardly more than just a banner, the power of which can change between and during elections, at any time, through a simple act of the mind. Banning the party will absolutely help.
And that's the thing; because the people who support AfD won't change just because their party gets banned, how likely do you think it is that they'll realize they need to be a legitimate part of a democratic system instead of what they've been doing all along?
load more comments
(1 replies)
There won't be democracy in Germany if the AfD gets into power. You need to stop the wound from gushing before you can worry about setting the broken bone.
I don't disagree with that sentiment at all, I'm just not sure how to set this particular broken bone. How do you make ~20% of the population less fascist?
load more comments
(2 replies)
load more comments
(1 replies)
There will always be a subsection og the population that adheres to fascist ideas. For a liberal democracy to function, these ideas have to be ostracized to make sure that no fascist party can establish itself in a major way. Some far-right voters will vote for minor far-right parties, some will vote for more moderate conservative parties and some won't vote at all. The key is to keep them from uniting while appearing moderate enough to win over some more moderate voters.
In Thailand they ban the major progressive party after nearly every election. Usually they've already formed another party even before the ban comes down. Often the party leaders are excluded but it doesn't achieve much and creates the perception that they're persecuted.
In Germany, political parties have been banned successfully, both the far-right Socialist Reich Party and the far-left Communist Party. While successor parties were formed, these were less extreme, at least in public, and less successful.
While the AfD is bigger than either of these parties, it still doesn't poll any higher than 20%. Furthermore, polls indicate that the vast majority of those who don't support the AfD, believe it shouldn't be anywhere near power. No other party in Germany receives that level of rejection from those who don't support it.
If you tried to ban a party with wider appeal, it would probably fail, but with the AfD it may succeed.
And that’s a symptom of media and social media echo chambers.
There is a difference between conservatism and being a threat to the democratic order. Germany has conservative parties that are perfectly valid, it's just that the AfD is not one of them.
There is a difference between conservatism and being a threat to the democratic order.
I'm not sure I agree. More and more it's started seeming like they're generally just waiting for a moment to drop their masks; eg. here in Finland now that we have a fully right wing government, our "fiscally conservative" party started their term off by limiting the right to strike, and is now echoing extremist right wing talking points about eg. immigration, LGBT+ people, and the environment. They were OK with an extremist right wing minister leaving us out of Ukraine's "Alliance for Gender-Responsive and Inclusive Recovery" because the plan mentioned LGBT+ people, and they stood in the way of banning abusive LGBT+ "conversion therapy" even though they claimed to be against it back when they still had to be in a government with leftist parties (sorry, couldn't find an English source for this but here is one in Finnish. For translation I'd suggest DeepL, it's vastly superior to eg. Google). They are also blaming the opposition for "besmirching" Finland's reputation abroad, meaning they don't want anyone pointing out that we have literal neo-Nazis in the government and parliament.
Killing the head of a terrorist organization won't help if you don't fix the underlying issues.He will be replaced in short order, usually by someone worse. Likewise this kind of political movement.
What the left in Europe (well in my country at least) still doesn't understand is that they're not going to fix this by lecturing the populist voters about how all their thoughts and ideas are wrong.
As long as it is a political party it is entitled to double digit millions every year in state party financing.
If it is forbidden, it cannot be refounded with the same people and ideology and their wealth is seized.
It ia not comparable to "terrorist" organizations, that dont need to abide by some rules of the dominant order in order to be active.
The democratic system should not actively finance and aid those who want to destroy it.
Finally the ideology is legitimised every time it can be voted for legally, as it shows the ideology to be considered part of the acceptable political plurality
I agree, that this move is mostly about getting some time and deeper issues still need to be addressed. However, by law, if the party is banned so are followup parties.
What the left in Europe (well in my country at least) still doesn't understand is that they're not going to fix this by lecturing the populist voters about how all their thoughts and ideas are wrong.
I do not agree with this sentiment though. Because for a big part their thoughts and ideas are just wrong (e.g. scientific denial (like climate or vaccinations) or hate against certain groups). We cannot say 'well they have a point' when they simply don't have shit.
I agree with you that there's no need to pretend fascists have a valid point. But those who would reason with them fail to understand that fascists are beyond caring whether they have a valid point or not. They are simply determined to have things their way. While we try to educate fascists about where they're mistaken, they will smirk and load their guns. To them it's funny that others are so stuck on argument when you can just use violence to get what you want. They see this attachment to argument as weakness and stupidity, and they know what to do with the weak and stupid.
That said, whether banning the party would help depends on how committed their voters are to the fascist cause, and I'm not familiar with the scene in Germany. Maybe if there are many who are just disgruntled but not particularly committed, putting obstacles in the party's way could buy time to turn them away. But people get sucked in quickly because fascist groups know how to make people feel they belong, pander to their egos, and rapidly program their prejudices while persuading them everyone else is lying. It has cultish aspects, so there has to be a plan for how to deprogram people from a cult.
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(6 replies)